F# is related to the design of Generics for .NET
and thus owes a lot to Andrew Kennedy,
who co-designed generics with Don Syme. Andrew is a co-designer of F#, being the designer
and implementor of units-of-measure for F#.

Many research projects and prior language designs contain work relevant to F#, much of which
has directly or indirectly influenced its design.
Although F# is a complete re-implementation of a Caml-like language,
a special thanks go to the Caml team,
in particular Xavier Leroy,
who agreed that a 'Caml.NET' was a good thing to do. Xavier and others also
suggested we experiment with language design instead of just
implementing OCaml, which ultimately led to many good things. Also thanks to
Jacques Garrigue who gave
some helpful positive feedback. The OCaml team's work
on both the language and the core foundations of programming
remains an ongoing inspiration for us.

The F# team are especially
grateful to members of other language communities who have been willing to give us advice about F#
and to help us talk through aspects of the design. This includes
Anders Hejlsberg,
Simon Marlow,
Simon Peyton-Jones,
Phil Wadler,
Mads Torgersen
and
Martin Odersky. We're also grateful for
the support of colleagues in the Microsoft Research Programming Principles and Tools group.

Mads Torgorsen and Raj Pai were responsible for making the initial pitch to create Visual F# and
the Microsoft Developer Division led by S. Somasegar
is responsible for the Visual F# tools. Luke Hoban was the program
manager tasked with bringing the F# language and the Visual F# tools to market, including
building on the initial momentum and success created by
Microsoft Research and ensuring widespread industry adoption for analytical programming.
Hoban gained widespread recognition at Microsoft for his work on F# and during 2009
and 2010 took on an increasing leadership role in the team. Tim Ng was engineering
lead during this time.

Satnam Singh,
David Langworthy and
Dave Wecker
have been enthusiastic early adopters at Microsoft, as have Lars Nilsson,
Artem Prysyazhnuk, Julian Laugel,
SooHyoung Oh, optionsScalper, Dru Sellers,
Martin Churchill and Adam Granicz
externally, some of whom are now driving fantastic F#
community initiatives of their own.
Mathieu Verbaere,
Ran Ettinger
and Oege de Moor
at Oxford University used early versions of F# on a number of projects, including
JunGL.
Jack Palevich
first took the dive into combining F# with DirectX, leading to many good things in the development
of F#.

Damien Watkins,
Martin Szummer
and
Gavin Bierman were regular early co-conspirators in F#-related matters
and have given talks and demonstrations on F# at several events.
Tom Minka has been a useful colleague (though still programs mostly in C# :-)).
John Winn,
Tom Melham and
Jim Grundy
helped inspire the design of F# quotations.